UberDave:The Stealth Hippopotamus: Is there even 67TB of anime out there?!

Now my Asian Porn folder is right around that number.

I call my folder of similar size "Volume I".

That is better than some website I saw a few years ago... I wish I would have saved the screen shot from the site, but, it was a pretty straight forward website trying to teach you how to do something fairly trivial with directories in file manager. Pretty uninteresting... other than the directory in his tree on the screenshot called "teens".

PsyLord:FTA: The medium has a storage density slightly better than that of a CD

You'll need quite a few of those to store 67TB. Also:

If I'm mathing things out correctly -which, given me, is quite possibly not the case- you could do it with three crystals, each one about the size of a refrigerator. Not the sort of thing you could slip in your pocket, but if you had a big vault to keep it in, that might be worth considering.

If they want the dots to be read with an optical microscope (which is probably not the worst of ideas), then I don't see density improving very much.

Why does Jor El have an "S" on his chest? Is it for Superdad? Couldn't Clark just have gotten him a "worlds greatest dad" coffee mug?

It's not an S. It's the LL (The Els) in Kryptonian. It also means hope.And it's funny, since it forebode the importance of people named LL in Superman's life. Lana Lang, Lex Luthor, Lois Lane, Lori Lemaris, Lupe Leocadio, etc.

Jim from Saint Paul:See, that shiat i sjust hoarding. You will never...EVER... watch that many shows of anything.

The average American watches something like 35-40 hours of TV (and recorded movies/etc.) per week. At 1.2 GB per hour (well under the bitrate of a DVD) 67 TB is like 6.5 years of content. So that's only about 30 years of content, assuming viewing habits were consistent among live TV viewers and stored-content viewers.

At higher bitrates it's even less content; Blu-ray has a peak rate of about 18 GB/hour, making 67 TB only 0.4 years of content, which the average person would go through in about 2 years.

So it's a lot of content, but it's not as absurd as you might think. It's also possible that he's sharing content with other users (either in his home or over the tubes), which could reduce those numbers even further. Also note that while there's some effort involved in continuing to store old data, there's also effort involved in curating it to remove only the things you want to trash; so long as it's less work to add new disks than to manage the removal process it may well be the most efficient choice to "hoard".

Jim from Saint Paul:See, that shiat i sjust hoarding. You will never...EVER... watch that many shows of anything.

Just like anything else, it's a hobby. My hobby costs about $25 a month in electricity and about $100 for various related services and has some annual hardware costs that probably work out to a couple thousand dollars a year.

Jim from Saint Paul:likefunbutnot: The Stealth Hippopotamus: Is there even 67TB of anime out there?!

I have around 80TB of various forms of video sitting around my apartment and obtaining more is something that only consumes about 20 minutes of my average day so I'm going to go ahead and say yes.

See, that shiat i sjust hoarding. You will never...EVER... watch that many shows of anything.

I dunno. I'm up to 1TB of video on my computer and I've not only watched it all, I've "watched" a lot of it multiple times, since a lot of it is 720 HD video I recorded on my helmet cam and then edited down into manageable chunks to throw on YouTube.

OTOH, looking at my DVD rack, there are 75-80 DVDs. If those are on average only 75% full, then that's very roughly 225ish gigabytes of data...

Optimal_Illusion:I do have some "personal" stuff I would like to keep on a external drive, any recommendations on a nice low-cost model for beginners?

Plain old USB-based hard drives generally suck for a couple reasons:1. The ones that need an external transformer almost always use a deeply shiatty one that will probably overheat or otherwise blow out and take your drive with it.2. Some manufacturers (WD) have taken to manufacturing USB drives with a direct USB interface and no provision for a standard SATA connection, which blows.3. 3.5" hard drives REALLY aren't made to be moved around a whole lot, which is something that some people think they should be able to do with an external drive. If you have any expectation of your external drive actually being portable, use a 2.5" (notebook size) drive.3a. 2.5" drives really aren't manufactured for high capacity.4. "Green" low-RPM drives are frequently used in USB enclosures. I've found those drives to be substantially less reliable than 7200rpm models.5. For the love of god if the drive is meant to be used in one of those stupid vertically-oriented enclosures, lay it on its side anyay. No, I don't care what the stand is supposed to do.

Personally I'd suggest getting some kind of cheap NAS enclosure, like a Synology, Buffalo or Netgear, and stick a couple drives in THAT to serve as a data vault. If you absolutely must get something in a 3.5" external, Hitachi/HGST Tourio drives (HGST is now owned by WD, but a distinct product line from WD).

Also please understand that copying data to an external drive doesn't really constitute a proper backup.

I just bought a 32GB thumb drive to make a backup of My Documents. How stable are they?

Flash drives of all sorts fail without warning and zero possibilty of recovery. Having an extra copy of stuff is a good idea as an overall recovery strategy, but if you are paranoid about losing irreplacable data, I suggest something like Crashplan.com as a starting point.

I just bought a 32GB thumb drive to make a backup of My Documents. How stable are they?

Flash drives of all sorts fail without warning and zero possibilty of recovery. Having an extra copy of stuff is a good idea as an overall recovery strategy, but if you are paranoid about losing irreplacable data, I suggest something like Crashplan.com as a starting point.

Thanks...tho I'm disappointed to learn that flash drives are so unreliable. My son recommend online storage, as well, tho I'm a cheap bastard and the thought of paying $4/mo sticks in my craw. May need to reevaluate. Another issue is getting my 25GB of data and photos online, plus my emails from back to about '97. My upload is slooooooooooooow.